theyre aggregiously and unreasonably in the favour of the rail operators, ATOC is doing nothing for us, they take you address details but if you lose your card, no refund for the remaining time or new card containing the remaining time, why on earth are they taking address details if there is no refund for such a card loss ? unnaceptable !
we need to take this to the european courts and get them screwed into the ground on this one !
interesting touches to HCI here the idea that keys should be relative.
Broadband upload slow in just South Africa ? more like by design and everywhere
Dont think that this is poor south africa not having fast speeds, In the uk with a person having a 40kbps (40k per second) upload speed in London, which is pretty standard on a good connection, it would take roughly 27 hours to send the same 4gb of data. So as you can see this is not just a South African problem. This is to do with broadband connections being massively assymetric, big fat bandwidth down and very skinny up, which means sending or serving data to others, is very slow in comparison to downloading information, This asymmetry is beneficial for most people who like to download lots of data and for providers in that it means home computers are generally unable to act like servers on the internet, and as such we have to pay for a whole class of services including servers etc. which if we had much faster symmetric SDSL we wouldn’t need too, Im guessing now that download connection have increased to a theoretical 24mbit in some areas, we may seem more services like Bethere beginning to offer better upload speeds for connections. Though even there Be Pro 250k (2.5mbit) per second upload speed package, Couldn’t serve much data to many users before failing to deliver, as 250k per second upload speed is still very little bandwidth from a web serving perspective. Even in the unlikely event of obtaining this optimal upload speed of 250k per second, the best currently offered on any home broadband package, the 4gb file, would still take roughly 4.44 hours to send.
pretty much most of that which he outputs, emerges as a condign and warming tableau …… cough
i love the way he refuses to dumb down his vocabulary, I agree … screw the illiterate, you cant learn new words unless someone is shouting them at you from the front of a classroom, and you have a marginal fear driving you to an increased vocabulary.
I learnt condign :) … go dig out the definition lazy
His sophisticated rants would fly high above and appear so abstruse to the subjects he targets, that he could probably let rip in their presence and they would still feel a great deal of uncertainty, about interpreting his meaning.
long may he haunt our screens with documentarys only a minority of the population will enjoy.
http://www.speaknspell.co.uk/speaknspell.html
Speech synthesis has come on a long way since the days of this device :)
Feedback sent to Cepstral, and their amazing voice lawrence :
How much time and labour does it take to create a new voice roughly ?
What price would you be talking, to generate a voice like Lawrence ?
I think lawrence is very good but still has a little non neutral bias in there, if you ever come to create a truly neutral clear english voice, I’d be interested to try out. Also strange in testing the demo, that millie is capable of pronouncing the word “barn” but lawrence is not.
These pronunciation errata can obviously be corrected through misspelling the word until the speech voice gets it right, I guess a way of leveraging these pronunciation corrections, would be a pronunciation correction interface bring-able up on screen by hotkey, that would in realtime send a pronunciation corrective word translation back to a central database at cepstral to then be shared via update with all users ? such that all share the benefits of community labour towards improving the pronunciation dictionary of the voices.
Great work why do Apple not licence the voices from you ? As the system speech synthesis voices have not reached the phase of being bearable to listen to, in comparison to the Audio version of a book say. And also I dont think speech synthesis technology can ever reach its potential unlees the best quality voices are guarantee-ably usable from with any of the mainstream operating systems. Much like say Helvetica as a font, can be relied upon to be available on almost any computer.
When like photo-real photoshop composites, people cannot tell the difference between a voice artist reading the book in audio form and the speech synthesis voice of that same artist reading it, then I guess speech synthesis will truly have arrived as a medium. this ideal is probably like chasing a rainbow in terms of complexity involved with speech timing patterns but hopefully one day. Good luck with your endeavour’s.